I went to the con on Saturday August 11th in downtown Seattle. It was a lot of fun! I went to two panels: One was about playing games with geek kids, and the other was about the rampant misogyny/sexism thrown at female gamers/bloggers/etc online. Both were very interesting 🙂 And now I want to play Guild Wars 2 when it comes out…

Play tested “Sidekick Quests” which is a tabletop rpg for gradeschoolers. Was pretty fun 🙂 I was a squire with a club. I bludgeoned monster flowers to death.

I also played SPANC (Space pirate amazon ninja cat-girls)…which was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t available to buy there which was a shame because it was hilarious.

I imagine I’ll go next year as well…maybe with a booth of my own for my books. 🙂

That are clearly spam, but they are hilariously written. Like seriously, do you honestly think that I would ever click your link? Or that my “bundle of information” is clearly something that “needs to be shared with the world so please respond to my strange email that is mostly made out of numbers”…are you kidding? Really?

I wonder how much time they devote to crafting these messages + how much they get paid. If they get paid by click-backs then they need to seriously up their game. Or maybe they’re made from computer programs that surf the web and string together sentences that they’ve found to statistically go together.

Every so often there’s a clever one in the bunch though…so I guess they’re learning?

(Warning: This is a train of thought post and does not have much organization involved)…

I looooove the character creation phase of stories. I’m referring to the big push of the nitty-gritty details before I start a series/book. This is the part where I get each one of my cast figured out looks-wise, personality, a bit of history, age, jobs, etc. Characters can and do pop out of nowhere later throughout the course of writing, and some of those can be the bestest (Reloy), but every story has to start off with its set cast.

The first place I start is the mains. My stories have 1 or 2 main characters (with 1 exception) around which the over-arching story revolves:

Dahlia and Lucifer – Morningstar.

Rake and Ravil – Wastes.

Oregon Atari Argyle and Kentucky B. Coffee – Reactor 8.

Camilla / Col.Mayer / Sam / Soltana / Aliya – Prophets. Tangent on: This is my exception story, it’s also the first one that I envisioned and ever started writing. It took me years and years to finish book 1 (The Bound Prophets is a working title, but probably not a final). This story is unique in style vs the others and may require a complete re-write before it ever sees an audience outside of two of my friends. Tangent off.

When I started Morningstar I used movie stars as my visual templates. I found pics that worked with the story (3-4 pics per character), I pasted them into a Word doc, added one word descriptors, and sometimes a one-liner here and there. I included things that would immediately recall not just a character’s looks, but their personality as well. That I think is the most important aspect…character personality (and consistency of personality). Drives me up the wall when a character has some strange personality shift without it being explained. Just because a change is convenient to plot, doesn’t mean it’s right. In fact, it’s wrong. Characters are sacrosanct. I hate it when authors put plot above character, it drives me nuts. So…yeah anyways…I get pictures to help me keep their personality in mind.

I then print those pages off and tack them up on the wall above my computer, sharing space with timelines, factoids, and maps (I freaking love maps). These are the closest thing to my book bible without actually being my book bible. My bible is a leatherbound book called a book-book (it’s a book about my books, ha-ha I’m clever!). Into the book-book goes scene ideas, quotes, notes, dreams, random tangents, ideas for a book 5 books into the series, etc. It’s my cheat sheet and treasure trove all wrapped into one. It’s also home to amusing plot ideas that got scrapped. Wastes has some great ones that never came to be.

Damn it…off topic I’ve gone again.

So…I started off with celeb pics for characters (yeah, I already have a dream cast for Morningstar…not that that will ever happen).

Okay, let’s get on to present day (I wrote the Morningstar Trilogy in 2009).

I stopped using celebs. I went instead to a mecca of picture-ness that is Model Mayhem (it’s a website). Now, their purpose is not for me to go and find my perfect cast, but damn they provide such a nice way for me to find said cast. You can search models by their height, color scheme, gender, age, we’re talking hand picked. Now this can take me hours if not days of sorting through pics to find someone perfect. But when I do, it’s like a light clicked on. I do a little dance and copy paste them into my new Word doc of awesome. And when I’m done, I print and tack them up. They stay up until I finish writing the series (then into a file folder they go).

The best part about this process is finding new characters that I hadn’t even thought of simply because I find a totally rad picture online. This happened mostly with Reactor 8…I came up with a character named T. Britannica Peppers simply because this one guy’s pic screamed ‘use me please, I am perfect!’ So Tomato was born, curly crazy fro and all.

Uh, yeah, dudes called Tomato. The naming convention in Reactor 8 is unique, I don’t name all my characters after fruits. Which brings us to naming, sweet glorious naming. It’s not really that glorious, names do not get a lot of forethought in my book (at creation). I will look up the meanings of names after they’re chosen, but I don’t pick names due to their meanings (exception Prophets, but everything in Prophets is an exception). Other exceptions are my demons, because they’re named after Fallen Angels. I picked them because I liked the name and I liked the basic description in the Lesser Key of Solomon.

Names generally spring into mind when I’m daydreaming a scene to music (that’s how I plan my scenes…they’re all to music). Typically I get to the point where someone needs to call someone by name and…a name pops into existence. Marx, Kennedy, Lincoln…all came into existence at the same time. Ladriam and Appleadris were made up jumbles of pretty sounding syllables. Danny, Mica, Whitney, Celeste, Sammy…were just the first thing that popped into my head. But no, I didn’t just come up with Oro, Evgeniy, and Tasanee on the fly. I had to look up some actual names of the country of origin.

Anywho…sitting above my computer are the basics for Reactor 8. I got pics, schematics of oil rigs, equipment (harpoons, goggles, wrenches, snow gear), maps of my lovely reactors, and maps of the North American railroads as they stand (or stood) relatively recently.

I’ve been itching to write Reactor 8, but I must finish Wasted (book 7 of Wastes Series). I’ve delayed too long on that story and I have a few advanced readers who’ll start to cut at me with spoons if I don’t finish that beast already.

My mother, father, and I watch the show Grimm. We enjoy the show (Monroe is an awesome character).

What we cannot fathom is why anyone likes Sgt Wu. Seriously…he’s not funny, he sticks out like a sore thumb anytime he is in a scene, and why for the love of God is he getting scenes/camera shots to himself? He’s not a main character, he’s a side character and he’s poor at acting as even that. His one liners are shitty (that’s the writer, but still it’s his delivery). He has no charisma. I do not believe for a second that he’s a cop, I see him and I see an actor acting as a cop.

Biggest peeve – he has scenes where he’s explaining or showing the detectives how to do things? As if they don’t know how to find a license plate on a car? WTF? That doesn’t make any sense. Writers…what are you doing? Has the guy slept with someone, blackmailed someone, sold his soul to the devil?

Get him out of all of the scenes, put him back where he started out as, a character that showed up 1 or 2 times to drop off results or a test.

Also…he cannot be the first responder at every crime scene in Portland day and night. If he is then he’s a clone or has robots of himself wandering around the city. That by the way…that would be interesting and would make his character way better. Right now he’s a godawful annoyance and he gets noticed in every scene he’s in…in a bad way.

Best two shows of the season were the ones he wasn’t in. Okay, rant done.